merchandising

"Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Popularly licensed and profitable is he!"

That's not how the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song goes, but the statement is factually correct. The Nickelodeon yellow legend is still immensely popular across various age ranges. And that gives you some easy gift ideas for kids in and around your family.

Rather than merely give the kid in question a stuffed sponge for the holidays, you can dig a little deeper and offer up a couple Spongebob board games from Hasbro for less than $25 each.

Black Friday is less than a week away, and if you're stumped for gift ideas for a boy anywhere in the family, you could do worse than going with Star Wars: The Clone Wars merchandise.

The show remains one of the highest rated programs for males aged 12-25. That's no surprise since boys have always been the cash cow of George Lucas' $3 billion empire (no pun intended).

Hasbro is the emperor of Star Wars toys (at least those for kids), and the company has a couple of new, higher end items for the 2009 holidays.

The Clone Wars Remote Control R2-D2 is pretty much as advertised. For about $30, you get a replica of a Death Star comm-link that controls the droid's movements, sounds and lights. A kid will have fun driving him around the house. But, the toy is more fun for adults if you imagine that every beep he makes is really a rude, digitized curse word.

As the fall release date for the J.J. Abrams Star Trek DVD closes in, Star Trek merchandising is making a comeback.

Everything Trek made a huge bull rush earlier this summer when the first major run of merchandising took hold. Everything from bottle openers to iPod got the final frontier treatment. Now the DVD is shaking the space trees again.

The long-rumored Star Trek colognes beamed their way into stores last week -- immediately becoming a product that folks might want to try as curiosity without ever admitting they bought it.